Businesses are becoming more and more knowledge-intensive with an increasing part of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based work.
Businesses are becoming more and more knowledge-intensive with an increasing part of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based work.
Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers
by Oscar Berg
http://www.oscarberg.net/2010/07/serving-long-tail-of-information-needs.html
Businesses, in particular in the Western world, are becoming more and more knowledge-intensive with an increasing part of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based work. A study by The Work Foundation has estimated that we have a 30-30-40 workforce – 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less knowledge content.
Knowledge work is about such things as solving problems, performing research and creative work, interacting and communicating with other people, and so on. Such work is by nature less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work (transformational and transactional activities organized into repeatable processes). Both the inputs and outputs of knowledge work – which is information and knowledge – vary from time to time, from situation to situation. So does the purpose, activities, roles and resources involved in knowledge work. Knowledge work is also less structured and the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work proceeds.
In a knowledge-intensive business environment, it is often very hard or even impossible to anticipate in advance what information is needed. You simply cannot know what information will be relevant before the moment you need it. The information might not exist until the moment you need it, or you are simply unaware of its existence. That’s why more is better (“more is more”) when it comes to information supply in a knowledge-intensive business environment. If there is more to choose from, chances are there will be something for (almost) any need. That’s also why it has become critical for knowledge workers to access to the information abundance on the Internet. We also need to have immediate access to anyone who might possess the knowledge and information we need but which is not captured – often because it is hard to capture or simply does not allow itself to be captured (tacit knowledge) and exchanged.